


Hold me close (I need you tonight)

by orphan_account



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Bodily Fluids, Flu, Fluff, M/M, Oneshot, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-21 09:31:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a prompt on tumblr:<br/>I’m currently recovering from a sudden violent bout of flu that only lasted about 8 hours last night. I was up all night puking my brains out among other things. The paramedics even had to come to my house. Can I please request a fic where Q is violently ill, and he needs someone to take care of him, including holding his hair back when he pukes and giving him baths cause he’s too weak to do it himself? That would be lovely…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold me close (I need you tonight)

Q shivered, pulling his cardigan close around himself as he continued to type out long strings of computer code into his laptop. A couple of Q-branch staff tried to get his attention, but he ignored them and they soon let him be. Everyone at Q-branch knew better than to distract him when he was working on something big - if it were important, they’d have been more insistent.

He glared at the tiny flaw in his otherwise-perfect code, a tiny, ugly little feedback loop in a beautiful matrix of long, elegant command sequences. It refused to just  _ **work** , _dammit, and now the entire  **program** wouldn’t work right, and— Q took a deep breath and wiped his suddenly-sweaty fore-head with the back of a decidedly non-absorbent sleeve.

He winced as his headache flared up, a bolt of lightning flashing through his malevolently-throbbing head, and hissed quietly in pain. He screwed his eyes up against the lights, suddenly far brighter than they had seemed just a few minutes ago, and fumbled blindly for the glass of water on his desk. He just knocked it with his hand, and there was a loud crash as it shattered on the stone floor. Q just laid his head on the table and whimpered dejectedly, trying to block out all the light that was making his head ache so badly.

After a little while, there was a hand on his shoulder, gripping it firmly, and a deep, murmuring voice. It sounded vaguely amused, albeit gruffly so, and Q ignored it, barely even recognizing the words as English. The voice took on a more questioning tone, with its owner shaking his shoulder slightly, and Q raised his head, hair completely messed up, opening his eyes to glare blearily at the **imbecile**  who kept trying to disturb him. Couldn’t they see that he was  _busy_?

 **“ _G’ ‘way_ ,”** he mumbled, frowning up at the blurry figure, and **_my_ , **wasn’t it suddenly much taller than before? Or that might have been him, because he  _ **knew**_  those brilliant blue eyes, and the concern in them was so foreign that he must be imagining it, surely. He giggled slightly. Maybe he’d fallen asleep, and this was all some strange tripped-out dream he was having? Of you go, Q, down the rabbit hole and into wonderland, he thought idly, giggling again.

There was a hand at his back, pulling him gently out of his seat, and he growled in protest, but he soon found that he barely had the energy to make a noise, let alone fight off a 00 agent like Bond, so he let himself be manhandled out of his chair with as much dignity as he could muster while dressed in a pink cardigan. His joints protested violently at being forced to move, and he let out a breathless little hiss of pain. 

007 said something else, but Q didn’t even bother trying to understand the fog of words that he was hearing by this point. His head felt as if it was filled with cotton wool, clouding his thoughts and rubbing harshly against his brain. “Sod off, Bond,” he managed, and there was a low chuckle from the man half-carrying him, as he maneuvered the technician towards the door.

***

He awoke in a taxi, blinking blearily up at the other agent, who murmured something that sounded vaguely soothing at him. Q quickly fell asleep again.

***

The next thing he knew, he was laid in his bed, huddled under a pile of covers and shivering terribly. There was a sudden, sharp pain in his stomach, and he couldn’t get to the side of the bed before he retched up the contents of his stomach all over himself. He lay quietly in the middle of his bed, covered in his own vomit and his chest heaving. A tiny tear trickled from the corner of his eye at the sheer indignity of his position, embarrassment colouring his cheeks even as he began to retch again. 

Suddenly, Bond was there with a basin, holding his long (far longer than necessary) hair out of the way as he brought up what was left of what little breakfast he’d had that morning. Eventually the vomiting stopped, and Q laid back, utterly spent.

He was not to get much respite, though, as soon Bond was levering him out of his sick-stained bed, and Q mentally snickered at the thought of the great 007 getting sick on his perfectly-tailored suit. Bond somehow managed to lift him out of bed, all but carrying him into the bathroom, whereupon he set about drawing a deep, hot bath to clean Q off while the inventor watched, too weak to do anything but sit where he had been put, on the floor by the radiator.

It was only when 007 began to take Q’s shirt off that he began to protest in earnest, batting feebly at the agent’s hands as they tried to undo his shirt. 

The look that the 00 gave him would have frozen the blood of a man less experienced in Bond-wrangling, but Q glared right back at him. Admittedly, he was rather less terrifying, if the unimpressed look on Bond’s face was anything to go by, but still. He’d made his point.

Apparently Bond didn’t particularly care about his point, because Q found himself being efficiently stripped to his boxers (And, you know, had the circumstances been different then he might have enjoyed that, but as it was? No.) and lowered into a warm bath. He then proceeded to slip beneath the water, too weak to keep himself from being submerged, but he barely had time to panic before Bond had pulled him back up again. He gasped in a breath of sweet, sweet air, while 007 looked on in amusement.

“And that,” he told the Quartermaster, “Is why I didn’t let you wash yourself.” He smirked. “You know, for a self-proclaimed genius, you can be really stupid, you know that?”

Q stuck his tongue out at him, unable to find a better retort than to act like a five-year-old (Ill people were allowed to be silly, he decided), and glowered up at Bond. “And  _ **you’re**_  so clever,” he slurred out, trying to ignore his semi-nudity. “At least  _ **I’ve**_  got some PhDs to my name.”

Bond raised an eyebrow. “And yet I’m not the one being given a bath. Do you see how this works?”

“I hate you.” Q folded his arms, pouting in a way that would have had any man without 007’s pokerface doubled over in fits of giggles, and let himself be bathed.

***

Feeling marginally better, but still exhausted, Q lay sleepily in bed, feeling warm and cozy for the first time that day. Bond finished tucking him in and turned to leave, but then paused. He bent down and landed a gentle and hesitant kiss on Q’s forehead, before backing away as if he’d kissed a snake - wary, and slightly hopeful. Q, barely even conscious, merely blinked sleepily up at him before burrowing down into the duvet. 

“Th’nk you,” came a muffled voice from deep underneath the covers. 

Bond paused in the doorway and smiled crookedly. “You’re welcome,” he replied, a hint of laughter in his voice.

“Still hate you though,” Q reaffirmed from inside his cocoon of blankets, and Bind chuckled outright.

“I know that, Q,” he reassured the young inventor, before leaving the room, hands in his pockets and a smile on his face. “Goodnight.”

 


End file.
